


Photon

by aderyn



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Airplanes, Episode: s03e03 His Last Vow, Physics, Pining, Religion, Science, light mass and energy, particles, prayers to the subatomic, what Sherlock wanted to say
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-21
Updated: 2014-10-21
Packaged: 2018-02-22 00:25:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2487659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock talks to god (particles).</p>
<p>Of course he does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Photon

 

_“Individual electrons are continuously emitting and reabsorbing virtual photons.”—Robert Logan, The Poetry of Physics and the Physics of Poetry_  
  


There’s nowhere he can be now that is nuclear.

Don’t think about home. Think about the parts.

Think about the number of protons in the known universe, the quarks and the leptons and W and Z. 

Electrons get lost so easily, bind again, right themselves in the cloud.

Think about that as the plane ascends, and you, particle too, photon.

Think about light; on the ground London, John and Mary waving, receding.

Think about light, impossible, infinite.

*****

He’s always picked things down to the invisible.

“John,” he wanted to say, “you know we’re like…”

The up and the down and the strange.

Parts and their opposites, a charmonium.  
  
“What was that Sherlock, a metaphor?”

A prayer, bloody hell; it was a prayer.

“We’ve all got to worship somewhere,” John said.

*****

“I,” Sherlock says, (turbulence), folds his hands.

_I believe in the quantum. I believe in the particle. I believe in what can be observed, analysed, quantified and discovered._

_I believe in the immanence of the particulate._

_Oh please._

_Bring me back to him whole._

**_*_ **

It’s beautiful here, in the spheres, in the spaces where mass accrues.

He could almost have wept along with those scientists (in Geneva, at the collider). Undeleted. Made flesh by what they'd longed for, searched for all the long years.

By what they believed.

**Author's Note:**

> [ "The Higgs boson is essentially a ripple in a field said to have emerged at the birth of the universe and to span the cosmos to this day..."](http://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/apr/28/higgs-boson-rumour-cern-lhc)
> 
>  
> 
> [Sky over London](http://www.globalgrasshopper.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Sky-over-London.jpg).


End file.
